Several KDE developers travelled to Brussels, Belgium to attend the FOSDEM event. Activities included bugfixing, development discussions and presentations, keysigning and of course socializing.
Pictures (more, more) are available.
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Read on for an extensive report of all the happenings!

Friday afternoon the first developers arrived in Brussels by train. After the necessary hotel check-ins and refreshing, we had dinner in Brussel's chinatown. First lesson learned: coffee with sake works amazingly well, excessive chili sauce does not.

Friends of KDE and open source such as GNOME's Michael Meeks also paid a visit to the KDE developer room, while Mozilla developers too met with KDE developers, emphasizing the respect and friendship there is between the projects and their developers.

While suggestions from the Swedish KDE clan on #kde-freebsd had us (well, some of us) consider visiting an American nightclub, we opted not to come off as complete geeks, so instead some stayed at the hotel, partially sponsored by the KDE eV, and others revisited Lop Lop.

Sunday brought more development and discussion, as well as some keysigning. The KDE web of trust keeps growing and growing, stretching vast parts of Europe while gaining a trust paths to and from developers in the Netherlands, resulting in a joining with the Californian web of trust, which entered Europe after LWCE 2002 in San Francisco and has now been connected.

Altogether a successful event. Things were a little more organized than last year, both FOSDEM itself as well as the KDE presence: David Faure, Olivier Goffart, Alexander Kellett, Rob Kaper, Martijn Klingens, Daniel Molkentin, Fabrice Mous, Josef Spillner and Scott Wheeler. Thanks for coming (again), I have enjoyed and am looking forward to meet many more KDE developers next year or at one of the upcoming events in 2003!

Comments

While suggestions from the Swedish KDE clan on #kde-freebsd had us (well, some of us) consider visiting an American nightclub, we opted not to come off as complete geeks, so instead some stayed at the hotel

I think you got this completely opposite. Not going to the club, instead deciding to stay at the hotel, is what makes you guys complete geeks. :-P

An 'American Nightclub' is a place for visitors from the US. They seem to feel at home in those places, maybe because they have to pay twice as much for a drink (compared to other places). Those Swedish developers probably won't even notice the inflated prices as well, a beer in Sweden is even more expensive.

One of the presentations I gave in the KDE developers room was about "how to write a Makefile.am", something that's still not very well documented anywhere.
I hope to find some time to complete that presentation (I put it together in 15 minutes right before the talk:), and to add that stuff to .... hmm, the developer FAQ on developer.kde.org, I guess.

The other presentation was about KTrader, but without slides.

I'll put the main presentation (the one made in front of a full room), into the kdepromo module. If anyone wants to see it and doesn't have CVS access, please tell me and I'll put it online as html on my homepage.

Oh, yes. Please do this! I spent hours the other day before it did what I wanted, and it was obvious to me at least that really didn't know what I was doing. A clear, up-to-date, description of how to manually set up a new KDE project is sorely needed.

Yeah, I was there too... I went to Faure's talk (it was excellent), visited the KDE developers room, and did many more things. There were so many things to do, and yet so little time (a whole weekend :-o)

There's indeed no Chinatown in Brussels. It is merely a few Asian Shops together. The only official recognised Chinatown in Belgium is the one located in Antwerp. This Chinatown is 10 times larger then the one in Brussels. Antwerp is the second largest city in Belgium, although it is not the capital of Belgium, it seems that all Asian people of Belgium go there for shopping and dim sum. Antwerp seems actually richer then Brussels if u look at the streets and people, maybe becoz of the income of the Port of Antwerp.